MacBook with OSX | Gentoo Linux

I like OSX I've been using it privately for a long time.

Koen used to joke that I was the only sysadmin he ever saw with an Apple, which is basically why the about page on hyves lists my nickname as Big Mac :-)

The last two years I used a dell laptop as my primary workstation with gentoo installed and a VMWare Windows image for the occasional time that I couldn't do without exchange support.

My wife has since nicked my old Powerbook and I haven't seen it back, it's been converted to german as primary language (can't find anything in the menu's :-) ) and solidly in use. I've given up all hope of ever getting it back unless I buy her a new one.

Since the dell was showing signs of wear and tear I decided that my new work laptop was going to be an apple again. So on my desk is sitting this really nice and shiny new MacBook Pro dual-core 2.6Ghz machine and 4Gig of memory.

But after working in linux for so many years I'm missing some of the productivity and development tools I'm used to on linux. I really like the productivity tools I gained by moving back to OSX (have a look here: www.omnigroup.com they make great stuff) but still, it nags.

I've been using with gentoo-prefix for a while which certainly fills part of the gap, but for some stuff I really need a native linux environment. One of the things I still do for hyves is building the system OS images with catalyst, the gentoo release tool. I can't do that properly in a prefix environment (I think.... fabian will probably correct me if I'm wrong)

So I've been looking at alternatives to get a native linux environment working. I rarely need GUI access, most of that is covered by OSX + Gentoo Prefix. But I do need a native commandline linux and I hate to dual-boot just for that. I want to be able to read my mail|browse the web while doing a bunch of other stuff in linux.

There have been rumours that Xen might support OSX in the near future, but nothing has materialized so far. Apparently the problem is that OSX | Aqua is really tightly coupled with the hardware. That makes sense to do for Apple since they make both the hardware and the OS :-) But doesn't work really well in a virtualized environment.

I tried parallels but it doesn't support 64bit linux, I build 64bit serverimages so that doesn't help a lot :-(

But today I found this post: http://taylorbanks.com/blog/ubuntu-on-the-macbook-pro-physical-virtual-or-both/

which details how to install a virtual 64bit copy inside VMWare Fusion.
And the best part is.... now I get to choose whether I want to dual-boot into one of my OS's or that I run OSX + linux in a virtual machine.

Yay, here I come :-)

P.S> After a very long time away from this blog, I'll see if I can keep it more current. The idea is to write stuff every week if I manage with all the other stuff going on in my life :-)